Framing Liberation Management as the Bundling of Practices: An Adoption Process with a Two-Fold Coherence

Abstract

This article examines how the process of adopting or rejecting liberated company management practices is constructed; this process is often portrayed as long, difficult, and complex. To address this question, we use a qualitative study based on narratives (Dumez, 2016) from two cases of companies in the process of liberation. Our results show that it is important for the process to be doubly coherent in order to sustain the adoption of liberation practices. We first show that the process involves three bundles of practices. These communication, support, and empowerment bundles have content coherence, i.e., configurations of interdependent practices. We then observe temporal coherence in the adoption of management practices, i.e., the preferred timeline for sustaining liberation. Beyond this double coherence, our analysis shows that adapting the process to the idiosyncrasies of the organisation is still necessary.